


I thinks there's something in your bones

by Baryshnikov



Series: Crossing the red-stained veil [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, But he's trying, Character Study, Falling In Love, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Stream of Consciousness, Tom just doesn't quite get it, Violent Thoughts, in his own way, what is love?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 20:34:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21087413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Is this what love felt like?





	I thinks there's something in your bones

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally gave in and put all these very similar explorations of Tom in love into one series.

Was love real?

It was a question Tom asked himself more than he’d admit. More than he could hardly fathom. And yet, night after night, he would lie there awake when all the other boys were asleep, and he’d stare at the blackness above him. That dark, endless, void sucking up the nighttime confessions, the ones that would have scared the light away. 

Tom would have liked that power.

And sometimes he thought he had it. 

The dark, sucking thing inside him. An emptiness that hung so full in the space where his soul was supposed to be. He had already cut half of himself away, wrenched it out like a weed from the flowerbeds, but he’d felt half-complete for a long time before that moment. Like he was born fractured; splintered right down to the bone.

Maybe that was why everything he touched cracked in two.

Because he was meant to be broken from the very beginning of his conception. 

Two parts, but never a whole. 

Was that what it was like to be in love?

To be incomplete? To have a part of you missing, until you found it in someone else. It didn’t feel like an efficient system, but his ‘friends’ said it wasn’t supposed to be _efficient_. Instead, they always smiled at him in that way that was slightly condescending whenever they spoke of love, as though he was a child that didn’t understand this grown-up talk.

But he didn’t want to be a part of their discussions anyway. 

The love they spoke of was simpering and damp; this slimy thing that made his skin crawl just to think about. Whenever those soppy sentiments slithered into his eyeline, Tom couldn’t help the clamminess that enveloped him; the awful wetness that saturated every particle that surrounded him until he was swimming through the air. 

For love was _everywhere_. 

An infection stitched into the oxygen, it wormed its way into his lungs, and sat there, dank and festering. Sometimes he could feel it as he breathed, this, strange, immoveable membrane that was slowly coating his lungs in a sugar-sweet film. 

If that was love, then love was weak. 

A flimsy little thing with no more substance than Dumbledore’s sermons on morality, the ones where he spoke with a lilt that gave away his incurable immorality. Or perhaps, it was merely a dandelion clock caught on the wind; airborne and gliding between the lines of light spreading its seeds all across the way. So simple, and yet…

What was love, exactly? 

Tom had tried to work it out.

He’d tried so hard to find the seabed beneath the froth of the foam. That tangible thing which he could hold in his hand, feel the weight as it dispersed itself equally across his palm. He wanted to clench his hand, crush the remanences of love that he found lying around, watch the sides split open like overripe pomegranate, the seeds dripping out and a gnawing rot at the core. 

Because love had to be rotten to have so many people beguiled.

It just had to be. 

But Tom had not yet met anyone who thought that love was best decayed. They all said it was fresh and young, a mere baby in this world of matured tastes. That was why they liked it because it was crisp and innocent and not yet riddled with the mould of pessimism. But that just made them all monsters, didn’t it? That they were so willing to consume this fledgeling of a thing without the slightest thought to the consequences. 

Tom had never met anyone who didn’t want to eat at that table. 

He’d never met anyone who wanted it all darker, older, more mature and meaningful. Falling in love in the first place seemed ridiculous, but even more so, when it was frivolous; when they arrived one day and disappeared the next.

A quick turnover devalued the price of love. 

And that was the problem with all his ‘friends’; they thought they understood love, so they squandered it. They spent what they had, and then what they didn’t, used up all the fresh young things in days, and kissed so many mouths that it was indecent. 

Tom could see the imprints on their lips.

The red stains on their mouths that no amount of lying would ever wash away. 

Lying there in the dark, Tom touched his own lips. Feeling the cupid’s bow, and along the edge, the lines sharp enough that he could cut his fingers if he was careless, and right down to the corner. He could pull them back if he wanted, feel the teeth that lay just below the softness. Even without a mirror, Tom knew there were no red marks on his mouth. 

He was unspoiled.

And he was going to stay like that until he worked out love’s ulterior motive.

He wouldn't indulge it until he understood where that intoxicating allure came from. The strange noxiousness that surrounded people when they were in love, like a candyfloss mist they ate it up and fell harder into the daydream that Tom was, quite convinced, was hallucinogenic. 

Though, it was fascinating. 

Compulsive even, to watch these, supposedly, intelligent people begin to flounder, stumble between the waves of love that engulfed them. Though it was beautiful, it was not pleasant. Just the thought alone of being knocked off his feet left Tom gagging. 

They all said he should loosen up. 

They all said he shouldn’t stew on it; that he cared too much for taking things apart and learning how they worked. Apparently, love wasn’t about what went on inside; apparently, it was letting go, going with the flow, letting the rivers of fate decide where he should end up. At least that was what Malfoy said him when his hand dipped too low on his back.

Like Tom didn’t know the difference between sex and love.

He did. 

And he knew Malfoy’s penchant for the former. 

And he saw how he watched him. How they _all_ watched him, their eyes glued to his mouth like there was money stuck on his lips. None of them would admit it, because they were cowards at heart, but they all wanted him to fall in love. To fall in love with _them_. To kiss them and touch and taste them; their wanting was strung through the air, stitched into every pause and weaved into their every glance. 

They all wanted to be the one to open his eyes. 

But his eyes were wide open, and as far as he could see, there was nothing in those manifestations of love that was meaningful. For what was the point in getting his mouth wet and his jaw aching if there was nothing else.

If that was all love was, then love was boring. 

Overrated. 

The blackness above him seemed to agree. It always agreed in its silent way. Even when static cut at his ears and there was truly nothing before his eyes, the black would swallow him up, give his brain something to focus on before it started to tear itself apart, because it would. When a part of you is missing, the rest will try and make it up, even if that means ripping bits out and shoving them into shapes they would never fit. 

Tom moved his fingers off his lips and rubbed his eyes. 

It was so late, it was early. 

It had to be.

For the gnawing was starting again.

The only time he acknowledged it was late at night; that was the _only_ time it was allowed to come to the surface; like a mermaid attracted to the sound of lost sailors it reached up through his flesh to scratch at the underside of his skin. It was a strange feeling.

A scratching. 

A gnawing. 

A hunger that was never really sated. 

Just recently, it tried to rise up during the day, always at the same time, always when the same person walked into the room. Those times were the worst. For there was nothing more unnerving that a heat settling on his skin like snowflakes. Little crystals of burning ice that made him scrunch his knuckles until they cracked. 

Was that love?

Was this… strange thing that felt so alien, just love’s infection, finally spreading out from his lungs and sliding into every crag and crevice. Warming him from the inside out like he had swallowed coals without realising. It _should_ have been unpleasant. 

It should have been sickening.

But it was just confusing. 

Particularly given who it was that made him feel so… odd. So foreign in his own skin, just suddenly aware of being caught in reality, of being tangible, and of being here and real, a material being that could touch and be touched.

It was these times, when he was alone in the dark, that Tom could feel Malfoy’s hands burning on his back. The exact spread of his fingers, so hot that they were practically melting into his flesh, dissolving and becoming one liquescent mess. But Tom would never share how _nice_ that felt; how intimate, and how much he wanted to feel the scalding in _other_ places. 

And produced by other people’s hands. 

Well… one other person’s hands.

The one who made him hot and cold; shivery and feverish, a prisoner in his own body and a fugitive evading capture. Harry. Harry Potter. He was different, though Tom couldn’t have said why. He just was. Perhaps, it was the similarities between them, those unavoidable likenesses that drew them together as perfect inverses of each other. 

Time and time again, the blackness above him formed faces. It started as an ambiguous image of shape and colour all shifting together that, when Tom blinked too slow, came together to make Harry’s face. Always Harry's face. So much so that he was becoming a glaze spread so thick across the dark that he dripped down, curling between the creases in Tom’s brain, just so he could infect his dreams with the falsities of love. 

Because this couldn’t be love, could it?

This was too _unpredictable_. Too much like having a livewire forced through his veins and feeling flicker and spark so that he jolted whenever Harry’s hand accidentally touched his own. And they touched an awful lot.

Never for very long though. 

Just the glimpse of Harry’s fingers touching the tips of his own before he was making apologies and stepping away.

Tom never wanted Harry to leave him. 

For, when they touched, that empty thing inside him, receded as the tide does, leaving nothing but a trail of white foam behind. And it felt so good to full for once. To not have a void _gnawing_ on his insides, but at the same time, Tom had never been so exposed. 

Even now.

Even when he was sheltered by walls and curtains and the dark veil of night, he couldn’t help how sore he was, like a knife wound sat heavy in his stomach, inflamed by the bite of the air. But there were no open wounds that oozed, just the stickiness of Tom’s own skin, suffocating in this airless oxygen, just the sandpaper of his clothes rubbing at his body, as abrasive as cut glass scrubbing through layer upon layer of his skin.

Until he was bare. 

Vulnerable. 

Rubbed as raw as the fish who are stripped of their scales at the market stall. 

And it hurt. It hurt so much to been ripped right down to the bone and yet to still feel like he was empty. The was no hollow to fill, but the cavity still ached inside him. It always _ached_. So Tom rolled onto his side, feeling how even the pillow was coarse on his cheek, and even the duvet prickled the base of his neck.

Was love supposed to _hurt_ this much?

Was it supposed to ache?

To burn?

To scorch every inch of him with burnt-sugar memories of Harry’s mouth when he spoke. Of the glimpses of Harry’s tongue as it moved between his teeth, and the small flexes of his fingers that always got Tom shifting in his seat.

He was shifting now too. 

Wrapping himself around his pillow.

Trying to stop the restlessness from settling in his bones. The same restlessness that _always_ settled itself inside him when he thought of Harry, and all the simple things that he could have watched forever. That little frown that always appeared before he got angry, and the balls of his fists when something seemed unjust. Tom wanted to touch him when he was like that. All wound up like a ball of wires just being pulled tighter and tighter.

Tom just wanted to touch him.

To feel how real he was.

He wanted to feel the spaces that no one else could. The dips and the hollows, every valley that existed between his bones, and then the crests as well. All Tom wanted was to touch uninhibited. Never rebuked or chastised for tracing Harry’s mouth instead of kissing it; for exploring him inside and out just to find out how he did work, all because Harry didn’t mind when he did. 

Unlike all of _them_, Harry didn’t complain.

And Tom could see that he never would. And that maybe, just maybe, if he played his cards right, he might be able to bring out that side of Harry that was kept wrapped up in all those wires. The impulsive side that wouldn’t be afraid to do the things that Tom wanted but would never ask for. The things that seemed too _indecent_ for his tongue to curl around when anyone else could hear. 

Even though his fingers were already drawing indecent patterns on the inside of his thigh. 

But, despite the fact Tom couldn’t say those things, he still knew what they were. Perhaps, they were some, twisted, symptoms of love. This need to control, to bury his fingers inside Harry and watch him writhe; this need to twist and try to break him, if only to see if he was durable.

If he was worth the while. 

Tom just wanted to wrap his fingers around something solid and _pull_ it. Squeeze it so tight and drag his fingers over and over and over until it hurt. That was what he wanted in the very depths of his heart: to scrape flesh from bone, to maim something he liked because…

Because…

Being cruel seemed so much easier than being kind. 

However scary that was to think about. To know, for certain, that there was some monstrous thing lurking just beneath the surface. Something that wanted to hurt, and damage, and spoil everything it touched. Something that clenched its teeth, and ground its molars together and moaned into the pillow, when the hand Tom had wrapped around himself rubbed just right.

But maybe being scared of the things inside yourself was part of love? 

Or maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe he was in love with Harry?

Or maybe he wasn’t.

Tom doubted he’d ever be able to tell.


End file.
